Staff Software Engineer

Role

We’re hiring Staff Software Engineers across multiple engineering pillars at Whatnot — including Buyer Growth, Seller Growth, Trust & Risk, Discovery & Personalization, Search, AI Developer Tools, and Customer Experience. As a Staff Engineer at Whatnot, you will operate as a technical leader within and across teams. You’ll partner with Engineering, Product, Data, Design, and Leadership to define architectures, drive large cross-functional initiatives, and build the distributed systems that power one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in the world.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the design and evolution of large, distributed systems that power live auctions, payments, search, recommendations, trust systems, growth funnels, and more.
• Own ambiguous, high-leverage technical problems from inception to production — and set the long-term architectural direction.
• Act as the technical lead for major initiatives, driving alignment across multiple teams without formal management authority.
• Balance urgency and technical excellence, making principled trade-offs that unlock rapid iteration without sacrificing long-term scalability.
• Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, mentorship, and hands-on contributions to critical systems.
• Partner with leadership to identify the highest-impact investments for scaling reliability, performance, and developer velocity.
• Help Whatnot scale through its next phase of hypergrowth, ensuring our systems remain resilient as we expand globally.

People Who Do Well at Whatnot

• Comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building.
• Care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it.
• Have 8+ years of full-time software engineering experience, including experience at high-growth technology companies that saw significant year-over-year user or revenue growth.
• Have a proven track record of leading large technical initiatives in fast-scaling environments.
• Have experience designing and evolving distributed systems at scale such as service-oriented architectures, event-driven systems, real-time systems, high-throughput APIs, data pipelines.
• Have a strong foundation in backend and frontend development.
• Are comfortable moving between layers and integrating systems end-to-end across a variety of languages and technologies (we primarily use Python, Elixir, JavaScript).
• Have a strong sense of urgency and ownership.
• Move quickly, unblock teams, and know when to dive deep versus drive alignment.
• Have experience influencing architecture and technical strategy across multiple teams.
• Understand how technical decisions translate into user and business impact.
• Have a strong sense of urgency and ownership.
• Operate effectively in ambiguity, defining problems clearly and bringing structure to complex spaces.
• Have a demonstrated ability to act as the technical lead of a team or initiative without direct people management responsibility.
• Have experience mentoring engineers and elevating engineering quality through design rigor and thoughtful feedback.

Benefits

• Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
• Work From Home Support
• Home office setup allowance
• Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
• Care benefits
• Monthly allowance for wellness
• Annual allowance towards Childcare
• Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
• Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app

EEO

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.